World of Warcraft to Become New Plague Testing Ground

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World of Warcraft to Become New Plague Testing Ground

Gaming companies Blizzard and Vivendi are in talks to let a deadly virus loose on its subscribers. It's all part of real world research on how people react to genuine epidemics.

The idea is inspired by the highly contagious virus patch "Corrupted Blood," part of a patch installed by Blizzad programmers in late 2005, which introduced a dungeon whose boss infected players as they fought. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, "experienced players shrugged it off like a bad cold, and weaker ones were left with disabled avatars...but then things spun out of control."

While players who left the dungeon also left Corrupted Blood behind, pets they dismissed while inside and then resummoned when they got to densely populate cities still carried the virus. This led to an epidemic outside the controlled dungeon where pets infected nearby players, who then infected others.

"Programmers tried to set up quarantines, but they were ignored. Finally, they resorted to an option not available in the real world: they shut down the servers and rebooted the system."

Because mathematical simulations can only predict how quickly a virus can spread, not how humans will react, researchers are looking to virtual communities for answers.

The patch currently in discussions will be a "compromise between what gamers would most enjoy and what would be most scientifically useful," Nina Fefferman of Rutgers University in New Jersey told Agence France-Presse.